Alright, let’s see what we’ve got here: The demo version of a game that takes place in a medieval, high-fantasy setting, has a pun in its title, and brings back fond memories of making people hate playing against me at Scrabble? Well, consider my interest piqued! My subject today is Vow of the Wordlocks, developed and published by Cahilban. Vow of the Wordlocks is a grid-based, procedurally generated fantasy RPG. The core gameplay loop within Vow of the Wordlocks centers around collecting letters from slain enemies and then placing those letters together in a Scrabble-like grid to form words.

The length and complexity of the words you form directly affect the power of your magical abilities. You play as one such Wordlock (I suspect that’s a play on “warlock”), and your objective in the current version of the demo is to gather enough collectibles to reach the end of the storybook in which your tale is set. The more enemies you defeat with your word-powered spells, the more experience points you gain. In turn, as you level up, you can choose to enhance your character’s attributes, learn new spells, upgrade spells you’ve already learned, or a combination of these.

While I really like the premise and much of the core gameplay loop within Vow of the Wordlocks, that’s basically the start and end of the list of things I like about it. There’s comparatively a lot more I don’t like about Vow of the Wordlocks. For starters, I needed to turn all the graphics options down to their second-lowest setting in order to get the game to run at anywhere near a consistent 60 frames per second. I don’t know if this is caused by poor game data optimization, if it’s my computer’s hardware showing its age, or what.

I can’t help but feel that what does and doesn’t constitute an actual word, as far as Vow of the Wordlocks is concerned, is questionable at best. Its tutorial provides the examples that “Tuesday” is not considered a valid word because it begins with a capital letter, but that slang like “noob” and “rizz” are perfectly valid. Those are slang terms that took root on the Internet, and yet I’m supposed to believe they’re legal in a word game set in a medieval fantasy environment? Call me pedantic if you will, but that just doesn’t sit well with me.

Speaking of what is and isn’t considered a word, it looks like I’ll have to “be that guy” once again. For a game that puts anywhere near as much emphasis on properly spelling English words as Vow of the Wordlocks does, you would think its developers would be equally dedicated to making sure the in-game text has been proofread, but perhaps not. While playing the current demo of Vow of the Wordlocks, I noticed a few errors in its in-game text – including, amusingly enough, an instance where the word “English” wasn’t capitalized even though it should have been.

I’ve probably come off as harsh toward Vow of the Wordlocks, but I want to clarify that I genuinely hope it gets to a point where all my fellow vocabulary enthusiasts and I can fully enjoy it. The potential for it to become a great game in its niche is definitely there. That’s why I’m pointing all these issues out now, while Vow of the Wordlocks is still “just” a demo: Hopefully, Cahilban will have the time needed to iron out all these issues before launch. Vow of the Wordlocks is listed as “coming soon” on Steam at the time of writing.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!